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Month: September 2015

I decided it’d be good to get out of my manuscript editing and clear my head with a prompt, so here’s one I scribbled 🙂 Since we’re about to hit October I decided I a little horror, hope it’s engaging.

Prompt : Something Wrapped
We wait for them to fall; for what we’ve done, for what they’re owed. Daddy says we don’t owe em nothin. Daddy says they shiftless and they tired. Daddy ain’t really say too much more about them since the first one fell.
Use to be a day that they ain’t make much noise. They just hang there like strange fruit unplucked while we ate smacky sandwitches and sung about glory as they swayed back and forth, back and forth. We’d wrap the hands, not everyone do that but we ain’t like Randy Portson and his dumb-head daddy, if you ain’t smart enough to wrap a nigger’s hands you ain’t got no business wrapping up his neck. He’ll just toss about, try to claw his way out of it and you’ll end up shooting him dead before the picnic even begin.

The first time it happened it was so fast. The fallen was dead as dust for an hour or so and his tater brown skin sagged like dewy shit paper. We danced. I think Johnny Carey woulda asked me out that day if he got the chance. Daddy woulda had a fit. What type of boy has two first names’ he’d say.

Then the fall.
The sound of the snapping rope whipped all our tention’ round. He growled. He wasn’t a man anymore. Not that we gave him much of a chance to be one in the first place. He was strong, stronger than Johnny, Daddy or any other man tried to stop him. He was hungry, and bit at em, at their necks and face and anything else good lord gave shine to. He had a picnic of his own and bit through seven of us before we gunned it down.
It’s been happening all over. Daddy, me and the other five that got bit ain’t been feeling so hot this past week but ahm sure we fine. Everything is going to be just fine.

It’s rare, but not impossible to get a bit of good news every now and again.

After a donation yesterday with little to report I thought I’d check out my funds for AWP and how they were going. Thankfully I’ve avoided taking away from my savings by budgeting appropriately.

With that said I was about fifty bucks shy of my first goal, price of admission. I couldn’t help but feel good, I’m doing it. I’m on target. I’m being all responsible and adulty.

I have a tendency of losing myself to delusions of grandeur. When I hit a wall in writing or editing, I start searching for my dream agent. I read through their profiles and articles to add authenticity to my fantasies of how our interaction will go. How I’ll wow them with my gathered data of them and their clients, their shoe size, daily schedule, and my ability to research their professional profile within legitimate, sane parameters.

I’ve found myself doing the same with AWP recently, the delusion part I mean. I sift through the happenings of last year and what it must mean for when I go, think of the funny thing I’ll say during that panel where dream agent interacts with me and, well, see above.

I also look at the prices, as if something will change, as if there will be a special Charles Eskew rate. That’s what I was doing a couple of hours ago, and holy shit. There is.

OK, there isn’t, but there’s something better. Student pricing.

I was worried at first that this may only apply to the students of George Mason University, and my school wouldn’t count, but a simple e-mail to conference registration cleared that up.

How could I have been so absent minded? Well, I honestly didn’t think I’d be back in school this semester. I have had some financial woes when it comes to college, and I won’t bore you with the details (in this post) but essentially I am one of those forever students your guidance counselor warned you about in that horror story of the middle aged scholar. I am the thing that accumulates student loans in the night.

So, what does this mean? It means that I was expecting a few more weeks of plasma pumping fun before I could afford my attendance badge, but booyaw*! First goal down! I’m actually ahead of schedule, and ahead of schedule? Best thing in the world. I can secure my early bird ticket today, put any surplus I didn’t account for towards flight costs which means I’ll get a ticket sooner which means I’ll get a ticket cheaper.

So I’ve touched on it before, but there aren’t enough hours in the day…
Correction, I don’t effectively use the hours I have in the day. In a couple of months I hope to be hanging with other writerly types in LA, but before I get there I need to have a finished product. Okay, I don’t really have to have anything finished, I could go just for the hell of it, but that defeats the whole purpose of making it a goal at all. It’s a time limit, it give me a deadline to get off my ass and focus on finishing this thing.
I need to get my shit together. I have, as of writing this post (9/14/2015) I’ve not worked on editing my novel in over two weeks.
This is unacceptable.
A little backstory? I’m a pretty lazy S.O.B. I use to think this was part of my endearing charm but it’s just what adds to the widened gyre between me and everyone else who busts their ass to get what they want. I’ve recently tried to change this particular aspect of my character. I found that seeking out and taking opportunities to write professionally adds something to my day to day reflection of myself I hadn’t realized I needed.
Currently I am helping as a content creator and editor for a start up, going to school part time (currently 6 semester hours) online, trying to maintain a blog with…kind of constant updates, taking up a freelance job for a different start up company that needs some advert writing done, working 40 hours a week, and trying to edit a book for beta readers by the end of October. It wouldn’t be so bad if each of these tasks weren’t so self contained, but they are, and as stated I’m a lazy man trying to play otherwise.
I’ve recently tried something that seems to be helping a lot, and just wanted to throw it out there, even if it’s a little basic.
The biggest issue I’ve noticed is just how much energy I have at the end of the day. My job involves a headset and sitting for most of the day, and while that doesn’t seem very taxing by the end of my shift I’m nearly spent. Prior to this post I’ve been saving all my work for the evening and either half assing or not getting through any of it at all.

What I’ve done is categorized my weekly and daily tasks by level of energy cost. As much as I hate getting up I can’t deny that I’m more productive creatively and professionally in the morning, so I assign those high energy costs to that time. Things like editing my novel at a minimum of 10 pgs. a day and composing new items for the startup that I’m working with. If I handle those before my 9-5 job I’ve taken care of my more draining tasks at the beggining of the day before I’m too warped to even approach them.
Medium energy cost tasks like research for class and other projects I can actually do while I’m at work. Is it encouraged? Hell no, but as long as it doesn’t effect my performance and I stay ahead of schedule on all my tasks I can utilize break time appropriately and get studying and research out of the way.
After I get home I try to work out. In my early twenties I to had delusions of being that guy who ate lima beans for breakfast and sneezed whey powder. Reaching 30 this year has taught me I’m just not going to be him, and that’s OK, but excersice is still i

mportant if I want to stay on task. After staring at numbers and talking to entitled detail oriented individuals all day, I’m usually unable to function on a mentl level, unless I work out.
Of course by work out I mean flail miserably, but still something about it acts as a reset button, which seems silly as working out is tiring, but I feel refreshed after a good hour of leaping around my house in an attempt to do everything Shaun T promises m I can.
After i work out the low energy tasks are pretty easy to get through, those are mostly set up. For instance I have to compose at least 3 tweets a day for the startup I’m working with, and edit my wordpress blogs, and get things setup for th following day. These things are annoying, but not hard, so I can make my way through them relatively easy, and if I have any energy left I use it to have a life.
This is hopefully going to work out well, but while my schedule seems a little packed to me, I’m sure there are those of you out there with even more on your plate. I just wanted to post this to show while I originally thought finding time for writing and editing was going to be impossible, wwwith a step back and a deep breath I found something that may just work out .

So, I’ve been a little lax with my savings as of late, to help I threw my savings card in a cup of water that I tossed into the freezer. Will power is overrated.
Plasma this week went pretty well. No mishaps or otherwise to report, in fact I actually started a pleasant conversation with someone seated beside me.
She was one of those optimistic types that seemed to carry the mindset genuinley and not due to an overdose of self-help related literature.
Usually I slink my headphones on and either write in my moleskin or listen to an audiobook, which is fine as conversations with strangers inflicts an absurd fear in me that I can’t hope to explain.
I stay in my own head quite a bit. I’ve always been a weird dude, and it was just more convenient to keep to myself instead of saying something random or inappropriate. Unmedicated ADHD has a little to do with that, and I also honestly forget sometimes that I’m stuck in narration mode when hanging out with a group of friends or my girlfriend. “Where are you…?”

“We lost you again didn’t we?”

“I told you that already, weren’t you listening?”

These are constants, like the tragic testimony of arrows and knees in Skyrim. Where am I? I’m here, just not. We lost you again didn’t we? You have me, I just didn’t have myself for a while… I told you that already weren’t you listening? I was trying.
Woe is me and my tiny attention span, play now the micro violins and insert comparison about starving children somehow. It is kind of a superpower when I’m brainstorming though, it’s like untangling a knot of some plot point that previously put me in a corner.
Full disclosure, this post has gotten away from me, originally it’d been aimed at my issues with saving and the need to augment my low will power, as I’ve been nickling and diming my way out of AWP savings.
I just got lost fo a bit, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find my way back.

So, the whole no smoking thing isn’t really working out so well. Thankfully there’s room for fuck ups and if at first you don’t succeed…

The crazy thing about it? I never feel anything from it. I only feel that I’ve fulfilled some requirement of making sure I don’t want another one for some part of the day.

I want to punch everything in the face.

Full disclosure, those last paragraph? It was typed after only about 5 hours into my non smoking journey, I’ve now reached 24 and my head is throbbing, my skin is crawling and I don’t like it. So, yeah, just scratch that bit about “I don’t really feel anything from it” I feel everything from it, and if I can just get through the first two non-smoking weeks I think this is something that will stick. Not really because I’ll be proud or feel accomplished, but because I never want to go through this again.

I’ve quit before, the longest I’ve made it was about a month, and then I turned around and started again. I wasn’t a smoker for that long when I had, maybe a year, so the withdrawal effects were significantly lower.

I’m jittery, I’m lightheaded, and, as stated before, I want to punch everything in the face.

I downloaded a smoking cessation app that I think is helping me, it logs different metrics and how you’re progressing based on them. As cool as it is to watch my oxygen level rise my main concern is the money saved, all that doe will filter back into my AWP savings and that mixed with the plasma donations will get me where I need to be.